“Jeremy,” Maggie cried indignantly, although it was difficult to speak clearly with her face to the mattress. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Jeremy had lifted the hem of her dressing gown up over her hips, and was noting with interest that he could observe the heart shape of her bottom quite clearly through the cotton of her nightdress. “Me?” he queried innocently. “Just continuing where we left off earlier … .”
“My God!” She tried to roll over, but Jeremy held quite firmly onto her hips. “Jeremy, really!” Maggie chastised him over her shoulder. “Somebody just tried to kill you! How can you think about making love at a time like this?”
“My dear Mags,” he said dryly. “If I can think about making love with you with hundreds of Bengalese bullets flying over my head, I can certainly think about making love with you at a time like this.” Leaning over to place a kiss on her backside, he added, when she opened her mouth to speak again, “And don’t ask me about my shoulder. It doesn’t hurt, and I don’t foresee our lovemaking reopening the wound … .”
Maggie sucked in her breath. “You conceited pig,” she cried, this time managing to wriggle out of his arms. “As if I would even
consider
making love with you, after what you did!”
“What’d
I
do?” Jeremy asked, raising a black eyebrow.
Maggie was dismayed by the fact that she couldn’t help
but notice that his bare chest, besides being scarred, was also quite thickly haired. The dark curls formed a rich mat that fanned out over his flat nipples, narrowing as it trailed down his lean, muscular stomach, and then disappeared beneath the sheet in a provocative arrow. Maggie, however, wasn’t about to investigate what lay in the direction that arrow pointed.
Or so she told herself.
“You know very well what you did,” she said, tossing her long hair loftily. “You—”
And the next thing she knew, Jeremy was upon her. Though she hastily flung out a pair of hands to brace her body from the impact of his, she found them immediately seized in grips of iron, and pinned to the mattress, as if Jeremy suspected she might try to strike at him again, as she had in the Althorpes’ library—not to mention that day in the Rawlings Manor stables, five years earlier. With the full weight of his body pressing down upon her, however, she could barely move, let alone launch any sort of counterattack. Blinking up at his face, which hovered mere inches from hers, she grunted, “Get off me, you fool.”
Jeremy, delighting in the feel of her luscious body beneath his, felt a little short of breath. He was more than aware that Maggie felt the same, since her breasts, crushed beneath him, were rising and falling rapidly. He could even see her heart rattle hard against her chest, making the soft flesh above it quiver with each pulsation. Was she as impassioned as he, or merely frightened? There was only one way to be sure.
Lifting a single eyebrow, he inquired casually, “Scared, Mags?”
Her lips parted indignantly. “Not on your life, you—”
His mouth, colliding with hers, didn’t allow her to finish that sentence.
For a moment, she panicked, her fingers balling into fists against the pillows as she murmured an unintelligible protest against his mouth. It wasn’t that she didn’t like it. It was just that
this …
This was
serious.
Jeremy didn’t hear her protest, or if he did, he didn’t understand it. All he knew was that finally, after five long
years, he had Maggie exactly where he’d always wanted her—beneath him. And this time, there’d be no interruptions. He’d made damned sure of that. No menacing uncles, no prying butlers, no self-righteous fiances. Just Jeremy and Maggie, as it always should have been,
would
have been, were it not for five years of stubbornness on both their parts. Well, that would never happen again, not while he had breath in his body. She was his, at last … .
And what a prize she was, already well worth all of the trouble and misery he’d gone through on her behalf. Jeremy had been with scores of women in the past, but never before had he held one that felt so completely right in his arms, whose body offered such a perfect complement to his own. With her generous bosom and slender waist and limbs, Maggie was everything that was feminine, while he, broad shouldered and narrow hipped, with muscles hardened to stone from long hours of riding and fencing, was the epitome of masculinity. Of
course
they belonged together.
And if she didn’t see it that way yet, well, he’d make damn sure she would by morning.
But she seemed to be getting the message already, if her reaction to his kiss was any indication. At the first touch of his lips on hers, she’d seemed to melt beneath him, all the tension leaving the arms that, up until that moment, he’d kept pinned to the mattress. Her mouth opened to his as naturally as it had that afternoon in the stables, as willingly as that evening in the library, and she returned his kiss with just as much innocent enthusiasm. Only this time, to Jeremy’s lascivious delight, she was wearing far less clothing. When he released one of her wrists in order to place his hand over the place where her heart was drumming, he didn’t have to push away layer upon layer of gown and camisole. He only had to undo a single mother-of-pearl button. Wherever he laid his fingers, he felt only bare skin, skin that was smooth as satin, and radiated a fiery warmth, despite the chill in the room and her state of relative undress, a heat that staggered him.
Maggie let out a whimper as his fingers scorched the delicate skin of her chest. When those fingers dipped lower,
greedily pushing back the collar of her nightdress to expose one of her ripe, heavy breasts, Maggie tore her lips away from his, lifting her eyelids to stare up at him in the half-light, shocked by the myriad sensations he’d managed to arouse within her. Because suddenly, she felt more alive than she had at any time in the past five years. What she’d felt in the library, a few hours earlier, was nothing to it. It was as if her body, into which he’d breathed life in the stables that day so long ago, had gone into hibernation until this very moment. And now, all of the emotions and sensations she’d felt that day came flooding back, with a vengeance.
For Jeremy, the look of absolute wonder on Maggie’s face had a shattering effect. He had meant to go about this business slowly, carefully. After all, Maggie was a virgin—though by her own admission, a highly sensual one. He didn’t want to frighten her, wanted to take things slowly, wanted to allow her to set the pace.
But one glimpse of her wide, astonished brown eyes and moistly parted lips, and he was lost. Self-control vanished. Suddenly, the hands over which he’d thought he had complete mastery were doing things he hadn’t directed them to, fumbling for the tie to her dressing gown, reaching to pull up the hem of her nightdress. If he wasn’t mindless in his lust, then he was the closest thing to it.
But fortunately for Jeremy, Maggie seemed to feel the same way. Instead of shrinking from him and his unbridled passion, as any other innocent might have, she matched him, heated kiss for heated kiss. Suddenly, it became vital for her to feel his bare flesh against hers. Even as Jeremy was tearing at the rest of the buttons to her nightdress, she reached up and began wrenching off her dressing gown, gasping when he suddenly reared up and, heedless of his wounded shoulder, flung the offending garment away himself. For one moment, his darkly tanned torso glowed bronze in the firelight, and Maggie was able to admire, with an artist’s eye, his physique, which was every bit as manly as Michelangelo’s David … .
Only this work of art was made of hot flesh, not cool marble.
And then, with a cry of triumph, Jeremy managed to undo the last button that had held her nightdress closed, liberating what he seemed to have waited for so long to see. Maggie’s breasts spilled from the cotton material, the firelight playing over the creamy expanses of flesh like sunlight on snow. Lifting her gaze at Jeremy’s sharp intake of breath, Maggie was bemused to see him smile—a slow, self-congratulatory smile that, more than his kisses, more than the stiff urgency of his need, which she could feel pressing against her, convinced her that this man wanted her. That he not only wanted, but
needed
her. And that realization caused what had begun as a tender throb at the jointure of her legs to become an all-out ache, an ache she knew could only be relieved in one way … .
And then he lowered himself over her once more, moving to catch the rounded globes of her breasts in his hands. Maggie writhed as his hard palms ground against the sensitive skin of her nipples, but that was only the beginning of that particular sweet torture: A second later, his palm was replaced by his mouth. Maggie gasped at the unfamiliar sensation of hot wetness surrounding the hardened peak of her breast. At the first flick of his tongue, her fingers, which she’d already buried instinctively in his hair, tightened in the curly mass, and her hips, as if of their own accord, began to undulate. She could feel the stiff length of his masculinity pulsing against her now, and she began to move against that stiffness, hardly aware that she was doing so.
Jeremy, however, was very much aware that she was doing so, and it was only with effort that he kept himself from exploding right then and there. With gritted teeth, he lifted his face from her breasts and looked at her. Maggie’s head was thrown back against the pillows, her long dark hair a thick curtain over the satin bed-covers, her eyes half-lidded and her breath coming in short little gasps. When she noticed his gaze on her, she did not try to hide her nakedness, as other women might have. She was clearly more comfortable nude than clothed, which was unusual, in Jeremy’s experience, for a large-breasted woman. The discovery delighted him, however … though not as much as the sight of her
long, pale legs, flat belly, and, most of all, the fluff of black hair that lay between them.
That silky triangle attracted him as no other he’d ever encountered. Jeremy found himself as drawn toward it as water is drawn toward the moon. Moving until his body was once again covering Maggie’s, his mouth sought hers … while his fingers delved into that dark patch at the jointure of her thighs.
Maggie’s knowledge of the sexual act had become significantly more sophisticated since her schooldays, thanks primarily to her life drawing classes and Berangère’s informative gossip. She had seen naked men before—though, to Jeremy’s credit, she’d never seen one quite
that
large—and she knew what went where, but nobody had warned her about what it
felt
like. Maggie had thought she would die of shock when his mouth closed over her nipple, but when Jeremy inserted first one finger, and then another, inside of her, she was completely unprepared for the sensations that shot through her. Suddenly, it was all she could do not to seize hold of that velvet rod she’d touched so hesitantly in Lord Althorpe’s library—and which Jeremy had looked so surprised to see her holding—and guide it into her. But if he had looked that shocked when all she’d done was touch it, what would he think of her if she tried to—
Maggie needn’t have worried. Jeremy was not surprised at the willingness with which she opened her legs to receive him. Nor was he surprised at the slick moisture his fingers encountered there. When her hips instinctively rose so that the heel of his hand brushed against the core of her womanhood, eliciting from her a soft moan, he knew, with joyous certainty, that she was ready for him.
For a single heartbeat, they lay like that, breathing hard, Jeremy’s fingers pressed hotly inside of her, Maggie’s hard nipples tangled in his chest hair. He looked down into the depthless pools that were her eyes, while she blinked under the intensity of his silver gaze.
And then Jeremy lowered his mouth, tasting the sweetness of her lips at the same time that he removed his fingers, and
replaced them with that part of him that most longed for Maggie’s touch.
Maggie gasped against his mouth as he started to enter into her. This was a
very
different sensation from the fingers he’d slipped so easily in and out. In fact, from the very first moment the tip of his hard shaft prodded her, she became convinced that this was not going to work, that she was abnormally small, that
he
was abnormally large, that their joining was a physical impossibility best left untested. Suddenly, all the fear she had so ingenuously admitted that night so long ago in her bedroom came back, with a vengeance … .
She was on the verge of protesting, of shouting at him to stop—despite what she knew would follow, an accusation of cowardice, at the very least—when something inside of her broke. Maggie’s fingers, which she’d flung up against his wide chest in a last-minute effort at self-preservation, sank into his bare flesh, her nails raking him—until that impossible length sank all the way into her, and the pain miraculously disappeared.
Jeremy froze, buried inside of her, aware not just from the way she’d clawed him, but from the way her hips had stilled, that he’d hurt her. For one moment, he felt nothing but panic. What could he do? The last thing in the world he’d wanted to do was hurt Maggie. He’d thought she was ready for him! She’d certainly been wet enough. Oh, God, why had it been his misfortune to fall in love with a virgin? Why couldn’t he have fallen in love with a prostitute, like his father had?
“Maggie,” he gasped. “I’m so—”
But she wasn’t listening to him, and a second later, he saw why. Her hips began to move again, tentatively at first, and then, discovering that the pain was well and truly over, with more confidence. Jeremy sucked in his breath as the hot skin that encased his shaft pulled it more deeply inside of her. Then Maggie lowered her hips, releasing him … only to pull him inside again a second later when she undulated once more against him. Jeremy, stunned, met her hips with an answering thrust of his own. Maggie, beneath him, murmured
with pleasure, her head thrashing against the pillows beneath it.